


You Are Coming Down With Me, Hand In Unlovable Hand

by SeaOfBones



Series: Dimitri/f!Byleth Oneshots [4]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Feral Dimitri, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Guilty Byleth, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Pre-Relationship, one hundred percent angst, please let me love you dimitri, touch-starved dimitri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22513222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeaOfBones/pseuds/SeaOfBones
Summary: After five years pass in a single night, a melancholy Byleth visits Dimitri's old room. She doesn't expect him to catch her, and confront her.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Series: Dimitri/f!Byleth Oneshots [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1534364
Comments: 12
Kudos: 196





	You Are Coming Down With Me, Hand In Unlovable Hand

For Byleth, it felt as if it had only been a week since she’d last visited Dimitri’s room.

But it had been almost five years.

Glass still littered the floor, from one of the many windows broken during or after Edelgard’s siege, and filmy slips of cobweb draped gauzily from the ceiling, glistening a ghostly silver in the deep winter’s frost.

It had been almost five years, and for however long he’d been living at Garreg Mach, Dimitri hadn’t been sleeping here.

The last time Byleth had visited she’d sat next to Dimitri on the bed, perching on the thick woollen comforter. Five years later it was eaten through by moths, its formerly rich blue faded to something greyish. Dimitri’s friends had been worried for him. She had been worried for him. He had swept his thick blonde hair back from his face with grasping, fidgeting fingers, and laughed through gritted teeth.

_I’m going to kill her, Professor._

_I know._

Byleth had seen mania like Dimitri’s before. She had seen too much war, strife and death not to have. Fellow mercenaries, upon realising a job they’d thought simple was ripping at an old wound. And from what he’d confided in her, she had known that Dimitri’s wounds were deep indeed.

She had put an arm around his shoulder in comfort, as Dimitri had put his arm around her at her father’s funeral. To Byleth’s surprise he had let himself be pulled close, inclined his forehead to touch hers.

_Do you remember the promise I made, Professor? That we wouldn’t lose anyone else?_

_That was a wish, Dimitri._

_It doesn’t matter. I won’t let her take anyone else away from me. I won’t let her take you._

He had gripped at her shoulder with the brutal strength she’d seem him struggle to control. Clutched her almost tightly enough to bruise, before he had realised what he was doing and pulled himself back.

_I won’t let her take me either, Dimitri._

Byleth didn’t dare touch anything, clean anything, in this broken room. It wasn’t hers to touch. In less than a week after she’d spoken them, her words had proved false. She had let herself be taken indeed, made a foolish mistake that should have been fatal.

“What are you doing here, Professor?”

Byleth turned at the sound of his voice, heart catching in her throat. His low growl, edged with a sneer. Dimitri had always been tall, always been broad, but seemed to have only grown in the past five years. And now he filled the doorway, wrapped in the rancid, blood-caked pelt he wore about his shoulders, one hand dragging along the wall as he stalked towards her.

“Come to mourn the boy who lived here?” Dimitri drawled, a canine curl tugging at his upper lip.

“He’s still alive, Dimitri,” Byleth replied, hands stiff by her sides. “You’re still alive.”

Dimitri snorted. “The Dimitri you might have cared for is dead,” he snapped. He had stopped, and as she had noticed he now did when he stood still, he swayed, the hand braced against the wall twitching and tremoring. Byleth didn’t think he even realised he was doing it. “I killed him, Professor. I consumed his flesh and I wear his rotten skin. I know that what I have become repulses you, you and all the rest. It’s only right, to wrinkle your nose at a decaying corpse.”

Byleth shook her head, looking Dimitri in the eye even as the focus of his dilated pupil darted around the room. “You’re wrong,” she said. She could draw a line between the pained young Dimitri she had comforted and this man, the one who had spent so long in endless darkness that he could no longer see light. “I was missing for five years, Dimitri. You have all changed, and I was not there for any of you when you might have needed me.”

She knew there was some truth beneath his accusations. He’d had five years to mourn her death, but she had only seen the younger Dimitri a few days before. For his soft words and firm heart to be lost in time were a fresh pain to her. Everything she had wanted to say to him, every moment she’d wanted to stay by his side, were gone, and the man who stood before her now, the man who had lost so much of his own, she would have to get to know all over again.

“I still care, Dimitri,” Byleth said quietly. “I don’t deserve to be called your Professor, for how I failed all of you. But I still care.”

Dimitri didn’t answer, barely seemed to have heard her, his wild eye dulling. Byleth was still getting used to this, how his lucid moments would come and go, though whether it was as permanent as the damage that had half-blinded him or whether it was the consequence of his deprivation, she could not yet know. The skin beneath his good eye was dark and cracked, as if he hadn’t slept in the few days since she’d awoken, since she’d roused him from his torpor in the ruins of Garreg Mach.

He had thought her a ghost when he’d seen her at first, and she couldn’t blame him. Perhaps he still thought her one, even now. His friends, at least, he hadn’t watched die.

Byleth took a step towards Dimitri. He didn’t move to stop her. Just stared, like he stared into the rubble of the cathedral, the scars of Edelgard’s war. And as she had done a week ago, five years ago, she lifted her hands to him. He inhaled sharply as her arms wrapped around his waist, as if her touch was the brush of a blade. Stilled his manic trembling, from shock if not comfort, as she inclined her head. Pressed herself close to his broad chest despite his armour’s smell of sweat and death.

“You shouldn’t do this,” he breathed. “I could kill you. I could crush your spine.”

“But you won’t,” she said quietly.

Dimitri scoffed. “You can’t say that, Professor. You don’t know me anymore.”

“…I know,” she murmured.

Slowly, she drew herself back. Lowered her head, and walked towards the door.

“Professor,” Dimitri murmured. Byleth looked back. He turned his head and bared his snarling teeth, chipped incisors and pallid gums. “Don’t get in my way.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” she said blandly.

Byleth walked away, down the long, ruined hallway. Let out a shuddering sigh, and ran her itching fingers back through her thin, brittle hair. No, she did not know this Dimitri. She had as much claim to his counsel as if she had disappeared from his life for any other reason.

She didn’t know whether she deserved to regain their trust. Her rebirth was a miracle, but her death was not. And as she passed the rooms of so many others she’d failed, these five years gone, she could only hope. That perhaps, one day, she would.


End file.
